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It’s only by fluke that Obama’s black
Race might never have been an issue, says David Lindsay, and he should know
If I had every penny I have seen drop, I would be a very rich man. The penny drops when I happen to mention a particular aspect of my background. Or when people are introduced to certain of my relatives, or see photographs of them. I am mixed-race.
Which brings me to Barack Obama. It is pure chance that he looks the way he does, that he goes through life with dark skin and African facial features.
Born to a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, he could just as easily have looked like a young John McCain. Any full sibling very well might have done. I know: my two brothers and sister are all different in colouring: one was born with blond hair and blue eyes.
What would, say, a white sister have done to Barack Obama's USP? What if he had had nothing more than a Muslim name to distinguish him from all the other blue-eyed boys? Either or both of those things could have happened perfectly easily. They just happened not to.
And then there is Obama's courting of the African-American political leadership.
He had the chance to be a non-white candidate who was pointedly not beholden to the black, Hispanic or any other grievance industry. Those of us whose own non-white backgrounds are also not of the politically noisier varieties might have taken great heart from such a figure. But he bottled it.
Obama is not the first serious black Presidential candidate. He is the first black Presidential candidate who could just as easily have been white. Why couldn't he have been potentially the first ever mixed-race world leader?
When will it be our turn? ·
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I find all this colour shading talk depressingly racist, including this article which appears to say nothing much. I don't know how Obama is supposed to have 'bottled it' though, he's made no secret of his parentage, nor traded on it with the African-Americans. Seems it's everyone else who's obsessed with race and percentages. Hopefully mixed race will become accepted a pretty normal and articles like this will become even more irrelevant - most Britons are mixed race too; Celt, Scot, Roman, Norman, Danish, Anglo-Saxon etc. and that's just the ancient mix. We're all human after all's said and done.
I don't think Obama had much of a choice in being a "black" candidate. He's American. And in the US of A "one drop" makes you black. And that is accepted by people of African descent too, although they have historically made distinctions based on shades of color. But just look at the resentment at Obama's refusal to attend that State of the Black Union meeting. And look at the political discussion about his African, Muslim father. Apparently for some people his white, American mother, the parent who brought him up in the absence of his father, doesn't count for anything. Although there are some people (a minority still, I think) who now celebrate their mixed ancestry, I don't think either the white or the black communities in America are yet prepared to accept that some people are neither white nor black. And by the way, with an African father and a white mother there is not really an equal chance ("easily" you said) that he would look white. He was far more likely to have a lighter color than his father, but still be obviously mixed, or he might have had a creamy skin and African features. Take that from one who is from a country (Guyana, in my case but Trinidad and Tobago is similar) where all types of racial mixtures are a way of life and where one grows up being able to distinguish all and every combination of Black, White, Indian (as in Asian Indian), Chinese, and Amerindian.